Chapter Text
Part I :
Firefly
-
I was at lunch when the sirens went off. One moment I was sitting there, eating the rabbit and lettuce sandwich my mother had packed me that morning, and the next my hand had slipped and the rabbit meat fell silently to the ground.
The sirens were loud. That much I remember like it was yesterday. The sirens were so loud I had to cover my ears just to think straight.
Get Prim, I ordered myself, pushing away from the table and weaving through the crowd of kids, all rushing through the doors exiting the cafeteria, pouring out into the hallway in a wild cluster. Inevitably most of us got stuck, everyone pushing and shoving at the same time, all with the same goal in mind.
All trying to get to the mines as quick as we could, begging and pleading to no one in particular, that it not be our family lost beneath the earth.
As soon as I broke free of the crowd, I hurried to Prim’s classroom, only to find her waiting anxiously at her desk, hands folded neatly, not saying a single word. Being patient and calm, doing just as I had drilled into her time and time again, should this event ever occur.
Although, turns out preparing for the event and living it were two very different things.
Prim clung to my hand as I pushed through the never ending stream of people on the streets, everyone trembling or holding their breath as they pushed towards the mines.
By the time we arrived at the main entrance there was already a rope put up to keep the crowd back. Hundreds of people were huddled around, waiting, despair in their eyes as they stared blankly at the elevator doors, as if they could will the captain to come up and relieve them of this horror.
We found our mother clinging to the rope at the front of the crowd. And I should have known then that something was wrong. I should have known something was off about her right from the start.
Because never in my life had my mother not come running for me when something was wrong. Never had she waited for me and Prim to search for her.
By her side was my aunt, Lenore Dove. She wasn’t really my aunt. She was technically my father’s cousin. A distant cousin at that. Their exact relation never stuck in my head and I never thought to ask much about it. But nevertheless, Prim and I called her our aunt the same way we all called Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber the uncles. They weren’t even blood related to any of us and they were both old enough to be my grandfather, but the moniker stuck just the same.
An hour passed before the elevator doors screeched open and a large group of miners, covered head to toe in coal dust, came pouring out into the dim orange light of the cold, winter afternoon.
Cheers and cries of joy, of relief and solace, filled the air as family members dove underneath the rope to hug their respective loved ones. The size of the crowd dwindled down little by little.
Two hours later, a repeat performance occurred. More smoke-blackened miners appeared from behind the elevator doors. More wives, husbands, children, parents, siblings, friends, all came running towards them in a sobbing mess. More of the crowd dissipated.
Around the time we’d usually be sitting down for dinner, a third batch of rescued miners appeared and the same hysteria ensued. And I began to resent the families of the surviving miners. I began to resent the miners themselves. Because why did they get to escape while my father was still trapped underground?
Snow began to fall after that. It was only a light dusting but it was enough to make Prim shiver like a dog in a thunderstorm, the thin sweater over her school uniform not nearly enough to keep her warm. And I stripped off my jacket immediately, wrapping it around her and rubbing up and down her arms, trying to keep her composed and comfortable as we waited through what was shaping up to be the most difficult night of our young lives.
“Darling,” I heard my aunt mutter, beckoning her husband from further back in the crowd. I didn’t even know he’d arrived. And it shocked me, even in my distracted state. Haymitch usually avoided large gatherings like a plague. “Grab a blanket, will you?”
In a matter of seconds, I felt a thick wool wrap over my shoulders. “I’m okay, Auntie,” I whispered, my voice cracking, both from the frigid air and the fear welling up inside me.
“Shhh.” She wrapped both arms around me from behind and kissed my hair. She didn’t say any more, didn’t offer any words of encouragement or platitudes, because deep down she knew how hopeless this situation was quickly becoming. And I was never the kind of kid adults felt right lying to.
More hours passed. Fewer miners appeared, filthy but alive, and their families escorted them away with tears of relief in their eyes. The little that was left of the crowd soon became almost nonexistent. Soon the crowd consisted of less than fifty of us and the sky turned black as night overtook day.
There was brief talk of sending Prim and me to the uncles’ home for the night. The home Lenore Dove grew up in. But I vehemently refused and my mother still had yet to let go of the rope or respond to a single question thrown her way, and in the end my aunt and uncle decided it was more of a hassle than it was worth.
Lenore Dove wrapped Prim in a couple blankets someone left behind and cradled her on her lap, singing her to sleep as my mother and I both fell to our knees. She laid her face against the rope, her icy blue eyes wide and haunted as she stared intently at the elevator, like if she blinked she may miss my father walking through those doors.
I, on the other hand, pressed my hands to the ground, digging my nails into the cinders, begging silently in my head for someone out there to come along and pull my father free. For anyone to come and save him from what was surely a horrible, gruesome death beneath the earth.
If anyone could hear me, they didn’t seem to care.
As the hours passed on by, my uncle tried to convince me to drink something warm and sweet from his thermos but I shook my head stubbornly and laid down flat on my belly, my ear to the freezing cold concrete, as if I could somehow hear my father’s voice one final time.
“Come on, Sweetheart,” Haymitch scolded but I refused to even look up at him, to even so much as respond.
I wanted my father so badly, I couldn’t bear it. I wanted him so badly that I was frozen in place, unable to do anything, say anything, even so much as think anything, until he was free.
But at the break of dawn, all my fears came true. My entire world came crashing down, as the mine captain exited the elevator alone, a grieved expression upon his face as he pronounced my father and ten others dead, forevermore buried beneath the earth.
-
Haymitch carried a distraught Prim, still wrapped up in blankets, back to our house in the Seam. Lenore Dove and I towed my mother behind him, doing our best to keep her upright until we made it home.
Once inside, we quickly brought her to bed, where I unbraided her hair while my aunt helped her into a nightgown, gave her a glass of water and tucked her.
After she was settled, I made Prim some tea and toast with berries, while Lenore Dove got her into warm pajamas and sang her a gentle song.
“You can ask the flowers, I sit for hours. Tellin' all the bluebirds, the bill and coo birds. Pretty little baby, I'm so in love with you. Ooh-ooh-ooh.”
It was on my way back to the bedroom, holding the food for Prim, that Haymitch caught me by the arm. “Sweetheart, you don’t have to do all this. You can just lay down in bed and let us take care of everything.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted, scowling up at him defensively.
“You’re stubborn,” he shot back, looking at me with wary, bloodshot eyes.
I tried to shrug past him, never having liked it when adults told me what to do, but he was bigger than me, much, much bigger than me, and he easily blocked my path.
“Kid, you just lost your father,” he said, his voice flat and bone-tired. “You haven’t slept all night and you’re covered in soot and filth. You need to lay down.”
I don’t know why he felt the need to say that. I don’t know what good he thought saying that so bluntly was going to do.
But that was the moment it hit me that my father was really gone. That was the moment it hit me like a slap to the face that my father was never coming home.
Any progress Lenore Dove had made at soothing Prim to sleep was destroyed in a second by my loud, gut-wrenching sobs filling the air.
-
The funeral was two days later. Lenore Dove came early to our home, her own eyes red-rimmed and her hair done up in those pretty combs Tam Amber made her when she was a teenager.
I had barely slept the night before, tossing and turning, going in and out of consciousness every couple hours. It was hard, trying to be strong for Prim and my mother, both of whom were in pieces and unable to even drag themselves out of bed without my help.
Prim had only gotten worse when I lost it in the hall the morning after the mine accident. She had always cried when I cried, even when she didn’t understand why, and seeing me shaking and sobbing so violently had sent her into complete hysterics.
Lenore Dove knew it was something Haymitch had said that’d triggered my upset and she’d reprimanded him fiercely before trying to console both of us, trying to reel in our wails and calm us down. And I knew that this was too much for her to handle. I knew having to deal with two sobbing girls and a grieving grown woman was too much for anyone to take on. Especially when I knew how close my aunt and uncle were to my father. He was their best friend. He had was both their lifelong best friend.
I knew they had their own mountain of grief to reckon with and it just didn’t seem fair to make them handle mine too.
So I locked myself in the bathroom and pulled it together, while they both comforted Prim. I laid my face on the metal bucket that we used as a tub and closed my eyes until the tears finally came to an end.
By the time I exited the bathroom, Prim was calm, tucked back into bed and waiting anxiously for me to join her.
But Lenore Dove and Haymitch were waiting for me outside the bathroom door and they weren’t so easily deterred.
“Firefly,” my aunt whispered, cupping my cheek gently as she uttered my special nickname.
“I’m okay, Auntie.” I repeat the same words I said outside the mines. Because what good would it do to tell her that I was absolutely not okay? That I felt like my insides were exploding and my head was pounding and I was just barely able to keep it all together. That I was just barely able to put one foot in front of the other without crumbling to the floor and breaking down.
“Sweetheart,” Haymitch murmured, his voice cracking with guilt, but I shook my head before he could continue either.
“Please, you two have already done enough for us. We’ll be fine, I promise.” I kept my voice even, looking them both clear in the eye, hoping to be appear as convincing as an eleven year old could be.
My uncle immediately shot me a dubious look, which told me I was failing. “You don’t always have to be strong, kid. You know that, right?”
“You can let us take care of you,” Lenore Dove added in agreement, her hand still on my cheek.
“I’m really okay,” I insisted, blinking hard to keep back the moisture that so badly wanted to escape from my eyes. “I’ll be fine.”
“At least let us tuck you in,” Haymitch bargained but I shook my head again, not wanting to accept their kindness.
“Uncle Haymitch, I just want to be alone now. Please,” I finally begged, knowing he of all people should understand that. No one understood the need for solitary like my uncle. And no one understood my uncle quite like his wife.
And so they left after that, still very reluctant. Still with nervous looks in their eyes, like they felt wrong about leaving us alone in our grief. Like they felt that we needed them to keep us afloat.
In hindsight we probably did. At eleven years old I wasn’t able to handle my anguish on top of my mother’s and Prim’s. I wasn’t equipped to take care of them. I still needed a parent to take care of me.
But I wanted my aunt and uncle gone, because some naive, twisted part of me believed if they left my mother would magically turn back into herself again. In my heart I truly believed my mother would never actually leave Prim and me, that if all other caretakers left she would surely have to come back and be our mother again.
I waited and I waited but two days passed and she was still just as vacant as the first hour after the mining accident.
Lenore Dove got Prim ready while I dressed in my only black dress. It was too small, too short and frilly, and I had to wear my mother’s old ripped tights with it or else my legs would freeze in the winter’s air. But I refused to complain. I refused to make a fuss. Because nothing would upset my mother and sister more than for me to lose it as well.
My mother was a challenge to peel from the bed but between the three of us, we managed to get her up and presentable in time for the burial. We managed to get her up and dressed and fed by the time the funeral began.
It didn’t even feel like my father’s ceremony. Not to me at least. Maybe it’s because there was nothing left of him to bury inside that casket so he wasn’t even really there being laid to rest, or maybe it’s because I couldn’t hear over the birds chirping or my mother’s uncontrollable sobs. But the entire thing passed in the blink of an eye, with the only highlight being when Lenore Dove got up and sang for the newly departed.
“You're headed for heaven, the sweet old hereafter. And I've got one foot in the door. But before I can fly up, I've loose ends to tie up, right here in the old therebefore.” Her voice, which she so rarely ever allowed anyone outside the family to hear, rang so sweet, so beautiful, like a lullaby carried by the wind, traveling from place to place, to console anyone in need.
Prim seemingly agreed with my assessment, her never ending stream of tears slowing down for the first time as she reached for Haymitch to pick up her up, wanting to lay her head upon his shoulder as our aunt’s voice comforted her the same way our father’s always had.
“I'll be along, when I've finished my song. When I've shut down the band, when I've played out my hand. When I've paid all my debts, when I have no regrets, right here, in the old therebefore.”
I closed my eyes, letting the words of the song soothe me. Wanting desperately to find solace in the melody, as I had countless times before.
But solace didn’t come. For the first time in my life, Lenore Dove’s voice didn’t bring me peace. For the first time in my memory, I couldn’t even allow myself to be soothed by the ancient music, passed down by generations in my family.
Because I couldn’t let go of the uncertainty I still felt. I couldn’t let go of the uncertainty I had regarding my future. My sister’s future.
My mother’s vacant expression. Her melancholy. Her unmoving body laying in bed all day long. Her glassy eyes when I kneeled beside her, begging her to speak, to get up, to do something. It was all beginning to wear on me. As much as I tried to shove it down, as much as I didn’t want to believe it, the idea of losing her as well was slowly feeling like a reality and I didn’t know how to deal with that. Everything happening to me in that moment felt suffocating. It felt like a thousand pounds was sitting on my chest and I couldn’t get out from under it.
I watched as Lenore Dove finished the song, as the crowd of mourners did the three finger solute for our lost loved ones, as people began to dissipate and tearful chatter began to fill the air. But that was all background noise. The only thing I could really hear was my mother to my left, her pained cries, and my little sister to my right, her soft sniffles muted by our uncle’s shoulder.
And I couldn’t stand being there for one more second. In an unexpected twist of events, even to me, I spun on my heel and ran as fast as I could past the other mourners, away from the caskets, away from my family, and away from the final resting place of my father.
-
It didn’t take long for Lenore Dove and Haymitch to find me. I only had one hiding place and everyone who loved me knew it.
Beneath the honeysuckle bush in the meadow. I still fit there easily at eleven, my too small dress and tights posing no issue as I crawled in and curled up in a tiny ball, return to disappear.
I was trembling when they found me. And not entirely from the weather, although it had begun snowing again and I wasn’t wearing a proper coat.
“Sweetheart, you’re going to give yourself pneumonia,” Haymitch barked as he ferreted me out and wrapped me up in his fancy suit jacket from the Capitol.
“What were you thinking, Firefly?” My aunt asked, grabbing my chin in her hand so I had to look at her.
And I didn’t have the words to explain myself and I was just so tired and scared, and so sad — so deeply, painfully, excruciatingly sad —that I just shook my head and stared down at my shoes until they let it go.
On the walk back, Lenore Dove began whispering to Haymitch. “We need to take the girls back to our house.”
“You know we can’t do that, love,” he said, his voice resigned, like they’ve already had this conversation recently. “We can’t take Asterid’s girls. She’s their mother.”
“She’s catatonic, Haymitch. She isn’t caring for herself, let alone Katniss and Prim. Look at her face.” Lenore Dove’s wild green eyes land on my cheek, where the cinders from days ago remain. “When was the last time she had a proper bath?”
“Lenore Dove, we can’t take them-”
“We’d be protecting them and protecting Asterid from having to live with all that guilt, once she’s herself again.”
“It’s wrong,” Haymitch snapped, causing both of us to flinch. He never, ever snapped at his wife. Not that I’d ever seen. “Plain and simple, it’s wrong. We can’t take Asterid’s children. We just can’t.”
-
After that, I tried a lot harder to appear presentable. Both for Haymitch and Lenore Dove, and for my school. Every morning I woke up early and scrounged up breakfast for Prim. I rationed all our food, trying to stretch whatever we had in the house before the burial for as long as I could.
My uncle could afford to feed us, of course. Haymitch could afford to feed us for the rest of our lives. He had won The Hunger Games — a scary pageant where kids kill each other until only one is left — years ago. Before I was even born. Haymitch was richer than anyone else in my entire world. He could easily feed all of Twleve for the next decade.
But admitting to him that we needed help would only provoke more questions, questions he and Lenore Dove — and the elder uncles, for that matter — were already beginning to ask and I was determined to not invite any more.
After she ate, I brushed and plaited Prim’s soft blonde hair into two braids and scrubbed any dirt off her school uniform. I fixed my own hair and put some of Prim’s leftovers by our mother’s bedside along with a glass of murky lukewarm water from the sink. Every so often she’d come out of her stupor, sit up in the bed and look around like she had no idea what was going on, before falling back into her trance. And I wanted there to be food within her line of sight when one of those moments came.
During school hours I intently watched the clock, unable to focus on just about anything academic. Not when I had no guarantee of a next meal. Not when Prim had no guarantee of a next meal. The more days passed on by, the more the food in our home dwindled down and the more frightened I became.
The idea of telling Lenore Dove or Haymitch that we needed help was tempting. Some days, it was almost too tempting, like a drop of rain in a summer drought. But I was still more afraid of the consequences. Because if they found out our mother wasn’t caring for us, what if it got back to the school? What if Prim and I were sent to the Community Home, where kids were beaten and starved by the dozen?
Or what if their involvement made it so my mother never came out of her state? A part of me still hung onto the belief that if we just gave her time, she’d come back to Prim and me.
However I didn’t account for how nosy my extended family was. A week after the funeral, Lenore Dove and Haymitch were waiting outside the school when Prim and I walked out.
“You’ve been avoiding us, Sweetheart,” Haymitch murmured, not even bothering with a greeting.
“We’ve been busy,” I mumbled, holding Prim’s hand a little tighter in mine, as if there was a chance they’d steal her away from me.
“Busy? What, with a big social calendar?” Lenore Dove sternly elbowed her husband in the ribs, always chastising him when he stepped out of line.
“Girls, we’re just concerned about you. And your mama.” She reached out and smoothed down a stray lock of Prim’s hair. “Why don’t we go get her and the three of you can come over to our house for dinner tonight?”
Prim’s entire face lit up in visible excitement but I immediately declined the invite. Because there was no way our mother would be in any state of mind to go anywhere for dinner.
“No thanks. But we’ll pass the invitation along to our mother for another night, okay?”
I tried to step around them but, as if anticipating my next move, Haymitch blocked my path. “Nice try, girl. But I can hear your stomach growling from here.”
“Katniss, why are you avoiding us?” Lenore Dove demanded, frustration finally leaking into her tone too. “This is not like you.”
And I don’t know why I did it. I’d never said anything of the kind before. But the desperate need to keep our situation a secret, the fear of being ripped from our mother or her never coming out of the fog that’d consumed her, overpowered all the compassion in my little body and I suddenly yelled, “I don’t want to eat your dinner! I don’t want any of your food, in case it’s poisoned!”
My father had only told me the story of how Lenore Dove almost died a few months ago. We were in the woods and he had been explaining nightlock berries to me and how poison didn’t always look like poison so I needed to be careful, and to never eat anything if I wasn’t sure if it were safe. He told me that my aunt had nearly died years ago from a bag of gumdrops and that if my uncle hadn’t realized in time, if he hadn’t ripped the gumdrop from her mouth before she swallowed, she’d surely have died.
My father never would have believed I’d use that story as a diversion, that I’d weaponize something so personal for shock value to get away. But that’s exactly what I did.
My comment, my cruel, heartless comment was enough for both my aunt and uncle to freeze into place. It was enough that I had an opening to grab Prim and make a run for it.
We were almost home when Prim peered up at me and asked, “Katniss? Why are we running from Auntie and Uncle Haymitch?”
There was no easy answer for that. I didn’t know how to explain the complexity of our situation. I didn’t know if Prim would understand that if any adult learned that we were currently fending for ourselves, they’d split up our family. They’d take us away or cause our mother to slip further into her sadness or something else equally awful.
So instead I went with the simplest explanation. “Because they’re not our parents. And they won’t help us.”
Her little brows furrowed together, like she didn’t believe that to be true, but she didn’t question me again. Instead she tried to be more helpful. We cleaned the house the best we could, sweeping and dusting and even polished our father’s old shaving mirror, knowing how much he hated the layer of coal dust that settled on everything in the Seam. We ended the night sharing our last bits of cheese and apples with our mother, who barely even opened her mouth to take a bite, hoping against all reason that she’d somehow fight her way back to us.
-
A week later, our food supply was down to almost nothing. We’d depleted it in just a matter of days and I was getting more and more frantic as time stretched on.
But I stuffed it down and hid it. Because every time I let on to how terrified I was for us, Prim immediately broke down crying and said she wanted to tell our aunt and uncle the truth.
And I still couldn’t allow it. I was stubborn, to a fault, as my father and uncles had always said. But I couldn’t give up just yet. I couldn’t let them tear apart our family without a fight.
We just needed our mother to get up, to get it together, to act like our parent again. I resorted to begging and pleading, to throwing myself on top of her crying, wailing for her to help us. To come back to us. To please not abandon her children.
It was to no avail. And to make matters worse, when I cried, Prim cried. When I sobbed, Prim sobbed. When I begged, she begged twice as hard. And still, that did nothing to affect our mother.
Clerk Carmine came by to visit two days after we ran from our aunt and uncle in the schoolyard. It was obvious Lenore Dove had asked him to come. He wasn’t young and the trek to our home from his wasn’t a short one. But he did what he had to do, as he considered us his kin, and I didn’t feel right ignoring his presence on the doorstep.
But I refused to let him in. I told him our mother had come down with a cold, that she was fine but if he caught it the illness may take him out completely.
It was a plausible reason for sending him away, with nothing more than a hug, kiss and the promise of us visiting him in a few days, when all was well again. But it was a lie, just the same and I felt awful deep inside for betraying my family’s trust. My father would be so deeply disappointed in me for lying to his uncle.
Tam Amber made the trip to our house three days after that and if Clerk Carmine wasn’t young, then Tam Amber was outright old. But he made it out to us too, this time with Lenore Dove by his side.
I don’t know what he wanted though, aside from to spy on how we were doing, because I hid inside the house. I sent Prim to greet them alone, with the strict rule of claiming our mother was ill to keep them from entering the house, and then hid in the bedroom like a coward.
I just couldn’t face Lenore Dove. Not after I used her near death experience, the single most traumatic moment in her life, as bait in order to escape. Especially when her and Haymitch just wanted to help.
Prim didn’t tell me exactly what she said to keep them outside. But after a couple hours, she return to our room with tears in her eyes and a guilty look upon her little angelic face.
Guilt spiraled in my chest. I knew my sister couldn’t stand lying to anyone, let alone those we loved, and I still put her up to it anyway. Because I was determined to keep us afloat. I was determined to not let us be separated from our mother.
Still, I felt terrible for what I was making Prim do. All I wanted was to protect her, to keep her with me where she was safe and loved and no one could harm her. And to keep us with our mother, for whenever she decided to come out of her despondent state.
In effort to cheer her up, I told Prim I’d wash her hair. I saw the way her teacher had been eyeing the leftover cinders in her blonde waves the day before and I wanted to do something nice for her. We didn’t bathe that often in the Seam but we usually kept clean somehow. But with all else going on, washing up hadn’t been my top priority.
I brought her to the kitchen and had her lay on the counter, tipping her head back into the sink and gently scrubbing her locks until the soot flowed down the drain. When we were finished I brushed out the tangles and wrapped an old baby blanket around her head, sending her off to bed like that in effort to keep the heat from escaping.
I didn’t even consider starting a fire to dry her hair, having been drilled from a young age to never, ever ignite one without an adult present. Every member of my family were insistent on that matter. The danger of stray sparks and sleeping embers in a place like the Seam, where coal dust was ever present and our homes were made of aging wood, terrified them like no other.
But it was winter. It was the bitterest winter anyone could remember and I was a kid. And kids make mistakes.
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